Shirley Yeung

Assistant Professor, Teaching Stream

Campus

Fields of Study

Areas of Interest

Research Keywords: migration, cross-border mobility, concepts and infrastructures of integration; language, pedagogy, and language ideologies; semiotics and social difference; NGOs, care, politics/ethics of hospitality Research

Region: Western Europe – Switzerland, Canada

Biography

Shirley Yeung’s research has focused on language and migration. Her SSHRC-supported project, “Welcome Work: Hospitality and the Mediation of Migrant Mobility in Swiss Integration Policy,” critically examined dominant policy concepts of immigrant integration, exploring the ways NGOs mediate the linguistic and legal inclusion of immigrants via modes of anti-oppressive teaching and pedagogy. Her research sheds light on the ways structural inequality, xenophobia, and transnational and social (im)mobility are interactionally negotiated in educational spaces for migrant learners.

Shirley Yeung has also taught foundational skills in academic writing at both the college and graduate levels. She has led interdisciplinary writing and proposal workshops for the University of Chicago’s Writing Program and the Mellon-Mays Undergraduate Fellowship, and has helped to design and implement Writing Across the Curriculum initiatives for the social science classroom.

Education

Ph.D. University of Chicago, 2020

Publications

Articles & Chapters

2016. From Cultural Distance to Skills Deficits: Expatriates, Migrants, and Swiss Integration Policy. Multilingua: Journal of Cross-Cultural and Interlanguage Communication 35(6): 723–746.

2016. Flubacher, Mi-Cha and Shirley Yeung. Discourses of Integration: Language, Skills, and the Politics of Difference. Multilingua: Journal of Cross-Cultural and Interlanguage Communication 35(6): 599–616.

2010. Natural Manners: Etiquette, Ethics, and Sincerity in American Conduct Manuals. In Ordinary Ethics: Anthropology, Language, and Action, M. Lambek (ed.), pp. 235–248. Fordham University Press.

2009. McElhinny, Bonnie and Valerie Damasco, Shirley Yeung, Angela DeOcampo, Monina Febria, Christianne Collantes, Jason Salonga. “Talk About Luck”: Coherence, Contingency, Character, and Class in the Life Stories of Filipino Canadians in Toronto. In Beyond Yellow English: Towards a Linguistic Anthropology of Asian-Pacific America, A. Lo and A. Reyes (eds.), pp. 93–110. Oxford University Press.

2008. Michael Lambek and Shirley Yeung. A Guide to the Literature. In A Reader in the Anthropology of Religion, M. Lambek (ed.), pp. 613–629. Blackwell.

Blog Post

2016. Flubacher, Mi-Cha and Shirley Yeung. Discourses of Integration: Language, Skills, and the Politics of Difference. Language on the Move.

Book reviews

2014. Migrants in Translation: Caring and the Logics of Difference in Contemporary Italy by Cristiana Giordano. Somatosphere.

2013. Life within Limits: Well-being in a World of Want by Michael Jackson. Journal of Religion in Africa 43(4): 482–84.